Ebook: Mayakovsky: A Biography

Volodya, 1893-1915 -- Lili, 1891-1915 -- A cloud in trousers, 1915-1916 -- The first revolution and the third, 1917-1918 -- Communist Futurism, 1918-1920 -- Nep and the beginnings of terror, 1921 -- Drang nach Westen, 1922 -- About this, 1923 -- Free from love and posters, 1923-1924 -- America, 1925 -- New rules, 1926-1927 -- Tatyana, 1928-1929 -- The year of the great change, 1929 -- At the top of my voice, 1929-1930 -- The first Bolshevik spring, 1930 -- A game with life as the stake -- Mayakovsky's second death.;Few poets have led lives as tempestuous as that of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Born in 1893 and dead by his own hand in 1930, Mayakovsky packed his thirty-six years with drama, politics, passion, and--most important--poetry. An enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Revolution and the emerging Soviet State, Mayakovsky was championed by Stalin after his death and enshrined as a quasi-official Soviet poet, a position that led to undeserved neglect among Western literary scholars even as his influence on other poets has remained powerful. With Mayakovsky, Bengt Jangfeldt offers the first comprehensive biography of Mayakovsky, revealing a troubled man who was more dreamer than revolutionary, more political romantic than hardened Communist. Jangfeldt sets Mayakovsky's life and works against the dramatic turbulence of his times, from the aesthetic innovations of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde to the rigidity of Socialist Realism and the destruction of World War I to the violence--and hope--of the Russian Revolution, through the tightening grip of Stalinist terror and the growing disillusion with Russian communism that eventually led the poet to take his life.